After all, though her vast legion of devoted (and primarily gay) superfans have continued to chronicle her every move, Dusty has been out of the public eye for a very long time. She may still be a household name and command a genuine widespread affection from the Great British Public, but she hasn't had a Top 40 hit since 1970. Career-wise that was the beginning of a bad news decade, an amazing contrast to her Do-No-Wrong Sixties. Then, fresh from a handful of hits with her brother Tom in the folksy Springfields--at the time the country's top vocal group--Dusty plunged into a solo career which netted her seventeen hits with an extraordinary variety of material, ranging from boppy white soul through Bacharach and David tearjerkers to the histrionic Italianate ballads for which she's probably best known.

But the Seventies soon became the wilderness years, with her voluntary exile to America, a run of bad luck with various record companies, the drift into middle of the road soft soul, brain-numbing night club work and eventual silence from 1973-1977.

In 1978 the appositely titled It Begins Again, a curate's egg of an album, not only failed to stretch Dusty vocally but indicated, in the blandness of some of the material (including Manilow), that she no longer had unerring musical taste. Since then, Dusty'd records have been sporadic and her last album, White Heat, an experimental affair which ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, wasn't even issued in this country. But the spirit is willing--the voice is still very much there, and the long slog towards becoming more than just a household name again has culminated in a return visit to England and, of all things, a contract with Hippodrome whizzkid Peter Stringfellow and his new record label.

From the recent airbrushed images we've had sent to us this side of the pond, I half expected Dusty to look like someone out of Dynasty. But the forty-six year old ex-convent schoolgirl Mary O'Brien is looking naturally vivacious, with tousled white-blonde hair and a toned down version of her notorious panda eye make-up, today in purple and mauve. For the sartorially inclined, Dusty isn't wearing the silver outfit John Peel described as making her look like a mini cab driver in Bacofoil, but black tight-fitting pants, a polka dot cotton jacket and chic rainbow-pattern stilettoes. She's holding an evil-looking, steaming, cayenne drink in one hand (she's dieting) and a cigarette--a new habit--in the other. A couple of kittens play around her feet: "They're on loan from a couple of friends who knew I was pining for my two back home," she grins. "I used to have nine." The husky voice has a slight American burr.

So, has England changed much? "It seems there are a lot of angry people here, but I don't find it depressing because on a selfish level I'm so glad to be away from Los Angeles. It's a sick place, under the cover of everyone being so healthy and sun bleached. Really vapid and so industry orientated; the whole way of life is about TV and records and status and success." It seems like worlds away from her origins--a Hampstead schoolgirl singing in the evenings with brother Tom "in the land of debutantes in their drinking clubs"; in the late Fifties with the sugar sweet Lana Sisters, and those chirpy, cheerful Springfields.

It was on a 1962 visit to New York with the Springfields that Dusty first heard the black music that was such an influence on her and which she did so much to promote in the UK: "I was passing a record shop and The Exciters' "Tell Him" was blasting out. The attack in it! It was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. The only black music I'd heard in England was big band jazz and Latin music, which I loved. But this was a revelation."

Back in England, and now solo, she spread the word, promoting the then unheard Motown sound in particular by, for example, hosting the Ready, Steady, Go! Motown Special. "I copied a lot of black music, though I'd say The Exciters and The Shirelles influenced me more than Motown. But I'd copy them all; one day I woke up wanting to be Dionne Warwick, the next day The Ronettes. It took me some time to find my own style--which came with the ballads--but to this day when someone says a new act is copying me, I just don't see it." She's too modest, won't even admit she's the best UK female singer ever. "Maybe when I began I had the gutsiest voice, along with Lulu. But all that has changed; now there's Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet. Particularly Alison. Christ, what a voice. I'd love to duet with her!"

At a time when pop singers didn't make stands, Dusty caused a hullabaloo in 1964 by refusing to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. "I got into so much trouble over having it written into my contract that I would only play non-segregated audiences. There was a loophole in the law that if you played cinemas you could work to non-segregated audiences, so I agreed to go under those circumstances. Melody Maker picked up on it and by the time I got there it had been fed to the SA press. The government tried to make me sign a paper saying I'd sing to segregated audiences, but my conscience wouldn'y let me so they took away my permit and put me under a form of house arrest. When I got home I was slagged. People like Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo publicly criticised me as a trouble maker, for making it difficult to go there to work."

By the late Sixties, her reputation began to dog her. "What John Peel wrote about my recent Hippo appearance was hysterical and I'm going to wrap his car in Bacofoil for him! But I don't know how I got my reputation for not showing up; I always show up, except once in Bournemouth. I've got a larger-than-life reputation and there were times I wanted to live up to it, but most of it's manufactured. If a threw a vol-au-vent at someone, by the time the story reached Australia it was a whole tray. I don't mind; the only bit that hurts is my reputation for being difficult, because I'm not. I can be tough in the studio because it's my duty to put in my best input and if other people aren't 100 percent involved I'm inclined to lose my patience. But I've been very patient with the Hippodrome, under some very trying circumstances." Hmm, more of that later.

Faced with the UK showbiz trail of TV series a la Cilla or endless summer seasons ("I've got nothing against Blackpool, but night after night for twelve weeks?"), Dusty took to the US in the Seventies. So what of the purdah years? "People seem to think that it was a terrible time for me. Some of it was, but most of it wasn't at all. It was the first time I ever stopped and stood still and it scared me at first 'cos all I'd ever done was sing. I stopped singing because I just couldn't hack it; I lost a lot of confidence because each time I made a record for a company it was bought out by a giant conglomerate and I'd get lost in the corporate shuffle. It happened three times and despondency crept in.

"I felt a general disenchantment with myself caused by having a lot of time on my hands. Until then I'd been so very busy, and I went through maybe what a mother goes through when the kids are grown. With me, my kid was my career. Though my heart intermittently got in the way, my career basically always took first place. It was an identity thing: it was all I was. I went straight into singing from school, obviously to get the attention. There's something to be said for the fact that I don't remember much about my childhood; I must have had a sense of not being worth much and the tendency is to invent something to be. And you get caught up in it; the next thing has to be better, better. You start believing your press and become a non-person, the thing you manufactured. I was never a teenager, certainly I stopped growing emotionally in my teens. And suddenly I found myself sitting in L.A., a floundering teenager underneath."

"But didn't she get into pills? "If you live in California you're exposed to everything in the music industry and there was a period when, out of sheer boredom, I experimented with all sorts of things. But that wasn't my problem. My problems were about growing up. I was always very uncomfortable being the person I am. I'm still not happy with who I am, but I'm happier than I was."

Though in many ways Dusty is extraordinary candid, she has always refused to publicly discuss her sex life. This means, however, that she is invariably asked about it in interviews. "People ask all the time. I had a woman the other day who just wouldn't pack it in. It was endless--'Why aren't you married? Why aren't you married? Why aren't you married?' It's yellow journalism, something you learn to live with. The UK and Australian press are the hardest to deal with, they get much more personal than the Americans, unless there's a big to-do like the Rock Hudson thing. But in England there's a 'We made you, we can break you' attitude; the press were nice to me for a long time and then they got bored and got a jag on trying to cut at me. That was one reason why I didn't want to stay here, there was no privacy. I had everything coming at me.

"Usually I handle it by telling them my private life is none of their business, even though they're going to make it their business anyway, and I've learned to live with that. I don't take stances on anything, which probably irritates the hell out of you ! [Kris Kirk was an outspoken gay rights activist and socialist--MJB] I'm only militant about animals; I've spent a lot of my time over the last few years working for an organization which rescues abandoned tiger clubs and otters and kodiak bears . . . Maybe I'm so wrapped up in animals I don't know what's happening to people, I don't know."

Though she's quiet about it, Dusty does a lot of charity work: "Pete Townsend's wife runs a refuge centre for battered women and Pete is organizing a charity show which I'm doing because I've been beaten up--so I know how it feels and I know how it feels to be afraid to talk about it. I was beaten up more than once by the same person and the second time I experienced what battered wives often come up against, where they're not only afraid to talk because they'll get beaten up again, but the relationship was so disapproved of anyway that people turn round and say, 'We told you so, you should never have married him in the first place.' I've been through it and if I can do anything to help there I will."

So Dusty's back and Stringfellow's got her. "Sometimes Like Butterflies" is a subtle, tear-you-to-pieces ballad, stunningly interpreted by Dusty. But didn't she come over here to work with Jolley and Swain, the Midas-touch producers of Alison Moyet? "Yes, I did, and they wrote me a really catchy number, very commercial. They weren't ready when I arrived because they were working on Bananarama's album, which was fair enough, but I waited and waited and then I got the feeling Peter (Stringfellow) didn't want that. We had long and fierce battles because I wanted to come back with a funky, hit-you-between-the-eyes number, but Peter had fallen in love with "Butterflies" and from then on there was nothing I could do. It was his personal crusade--there was no listening to anything else.

Finally, Dusty regularly used to go to drag shows; how does she feel about drag queens taking her off? "Wonderful! In fact I want to take some friends to see some British drag, but I'm not sure where to take them because The Black Cap is so busy on Sunday lunchtimes, isn't it? I learned most of my tricks from drag queens . . . what kind of mascara lasts longest, how to apply eye shadow--very serious decisions. In fact, if the truth were known, I think I'm basically a drag queen myself!"

Kris Kirk
Gay Times, September 1985

About Kris Kirk (taken from A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk's Greatest Hits, edited and introduced by Richard Smith and published in 1999 by Millivres Books):

There had been many gay music journalists before Kris Kirk started writing for Melody Maker in 1984. But Kris was the first to write as an openly gay man, and to write unapologetically about the music and acts that excited him as such. Kris understood that gay men had always played a crucial role in pop and that "pop has always been the most accurate mirror of cultural change". It was fitting--and not entirely coincidental--that he began writing for the music press at the same time as the first out crop of openly gay pop stars appeared.

Born in Carlisle in 1950, his Roman Catholic parents unwitttingly gave him the suitably camp name Christopher Pious Mary Kirk. After reading American Literature at Nottingham University, he spent ten years in a variety of jobs (including working as a dresser to Tommy Steele and Benny Hill) before coming to London at the start of the Eighties to work for Gay News--it was then that Kris changed his name to "Kristopher with a K". Following that publication's demise, he moved to Melody Maker, wrote regular features for Gay Times and freelanced for a number of publications including Smash Hits, The Face, New York Rocker, The Guardian and City Limits. A chirpy man who it was impossible to dislike, Kris invariably managed to get the best out of those he interviewed--especially those gay artits relieved to find they were talking to someone "on the same side".

His groundbreaking study of the modern drag scene, Men In Frock (GMP 1984--a collaboration with his lover the photographer Ed Heath), was a polemic and prayer for the end of gender, uncovering that scene's hiddem history from the all-male revues of the war, through the Gay Liberation Front's Rad Fems, to the Gender Benders of the day. A book about gay men and pop--and provisionally titled The Vinyl Closet was commissioned but never finished. In 1986, Channel 4 broadcast Paul Oremland's drama documentary about Kris' life, A Boy Called Mary.

In 1988, Kris and Ed undertook what he called their "retreat from Moscow", moving to rural Wales to open a secondhand bookshop. But when Kris discovered he had AIDS in 1991, he reluctantly returned to London for treatment. He went blind the following year. With equipment supplied by the RNIB, Kris was able to carry on doing a little of what he liked best--writing. In June 1992, he became one of the first people with AIDS to come out in a piece he wrote for Gay Times--'Descent Into Darkness'; "As long as I have my friends, my family, my fags, my coffee, my opera tapes and my writing I guess I shall tootle along, even though I may not have all my coat buttons done up properly. Life is for living and I am trying to live it as well as I can. But I suppose that I feel that when death finally comes I shall be ready for it. Perhaps that is what life is all about."

Kris Kirk died on April 27, 1993.